Produced by David Starner, David Widger, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team MORIEN A Metrical Romance Rendered Into English Prose From The Mediæval Dutch Arthurian Romances No. IV. By Jessie L. Weston, With designs by Caroline Watts. Additional Arthurian Romances: I. Sir Gawain And The Green Knight. A Middle-English Romance retold in Modern Prose, with Introduction and Notes, by JESSIE L. WESTON. With Designs by M. M. CRAWFORD. 1898. 2s. net. II. Tristan And Iseult. Rendered into English from the German of Gottfried of Strassburg by JESSIE L. WESTON. With Designs by CAROLINE WATTS. Two vols. 1899. 4s. net. III. Guingamor, Lanval, Tyolet, Le Bisclaveret. Four Lays rendered into English Prose from the French of Marie de France and others by JESSIE L. WESTON. With Designs by CAROLINE WATTS. 1900. 2s. net. [Illustration: They deemed they had seen the Foul Fiend himself] PREFACE The metrical romance of which the following pages offer a prose translation is contained in the mediæval Dutch version of the _Lancelot_, where it occupies upwards of five thousand lines, forming the conclusion of the first existing volume of that compilation. So far as our present knowledge extends, it is found nowhere else. Nor do we know the date of the original poem, or the name of the author. The Dutch MS. is of the commencement of the fourteenth century, and appears to represent a compilation similar to that with which Sir Thomas Malory has made us familiar, _i.e._, a condensed rendering of a number of Arthurian romances which in their original form were independent of each other. Thus, in the Dutch _Lancelot_ we have not only the latter portion of the _Lancelot_ proper, the _Queste_, and the _Morte Arthur_, the ordinary component parts of the prose _Lancelot_ in its most fully developed form, but also a portion of a _Perceval_ romance, having for its basis a version near akin to, if not identical with, the poem of Chrétien de Troyes, and a group of episodic romances, some of considerable length, the majority of which have not yet been discovered elsewhere. [Footnote: _Cf_. my _Legend of Sir Lancelot du Lac_; Grimm Library, vol. xii., chapter ix., where a brief summary of the contents of the Dutch _Lancelot_ is given.]